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Jews and MoneyOct 24 2006

A story of over-achievement in the face of discrimination. A source of fuel for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish power. Is there something unique about the relationship between Jews and business? If so, what exactly is it that sets the Jewish experience apart from that of other 'market-dominant' ethnic minorities? Niall Ferguson offers some new thoughts on this old and often vexed question in this presentation.

biography : NIALL FERGUSON

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History : Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1997), was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (Basic Books) and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (Penguin). The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001 he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (Basic), following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England. He is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2003 he wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK terrestrial broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire : The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic), was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin. His latest book is The War of the World, a global history of twentieth-century conflict, which was published in September 2006. A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall Ferguson writes and reviews regularly for the British and American press. He is a weekly columnist for the LA Times. In 2004 Time magazine named him as one of the world’s hundred most influential people.